Down To Earth

Editorial. Sunita Narain.
XXII.VIII.XV

GOVERNANCE
MATTERS

By Sunita
Narain

It is time we
recognised that the current ways of fixing the
environment are not working. Rivers are more
contaminated; air is more polluted and cities are
filling up with garbage we cannot handle. The
question is: where are we going wrong? What do we
need to do?

For this, we first need
to recognise that India and countries like ours
have to find new technical solutions and
approaches to solve environmental problems. It is
a fact that the already industrialised world had
the surplus money to find technologies and fund
mitigation and governance, and they continue to
spend heavily even today. We have huge
demands—everything from basic needs to
infrastructure—on the same finances and will
never be able to catch up in this game. So, we
need to build a new practice of environmental
management, which is affordable and
sustainable. In this way, environmental management
options will have to be explored carefully and
leaps made.

Take river cleaning. For
long we have invested in sewage treatment plant
technologies that were adopted by the rest of the
world. We hoped we would clean our rivers the way
other countries did. But we forgot that most of
our cities do not have sanitation systems or
underground sewage networks. Even if flush toilets
of a few urban Indians are connected to the
underground drain, and their waste is pumped for
some length and transported to sewage plants and
treated, it does not clean rivers. The reason is
that the rest—in fact, the majority—do
not have the same connection. Their waste goes to
open drains and then to the same river or lake.
The end result is dirty water.

Pollution control
measures must be affordable to meet the needs of
all. They must cut the cost of water supply and
the cost of taking back wastewater. This would
require reworking sewage management so that we can
intercept wastewater in open drains and septic
tanks, and treat it as cost effectively as
possible. It would also require strategies to make
sure that rivers have enough water to dilute
wastewater.

All this can be done.
But it will require backing new solutions,
ensuring that they are put to practice and scaling
them up.

For this, we also
require the ultimate investment in our
institutions of governance. Without them we cannot
have arbitration or resolution of difficult
conflicts. For too long in our environmental
journey we have neglected this aspect. The rot
has, in fact, accelerated in the past 10 years,
even as environmental issues have been
mainstreamed. This is because governance has never
been on the agenda.

As a result, governments
and civil society have invested all their
political capital, bureaucratic time, energy of
committees and media airtime into airing
differences on project and policy designs, and not
on the capacity that we need to implement these in
the real world. We continue to churn out
notifications and policies for regulating
environmental degradation—everything from
battery rules to hazardous waste management to
plastic disposal and clearance for every building
or shopping mall or penalties against illegal
dumping of waste—without any consideration
whether we can actually do this on the
ground.

It is time we focused
firmly and squarely on strengthening the capacity
of regulatory agencies. For instance, even after
years, the pollution control boards remain
understaffed and grossly neglected. The problem is
that this is an agenda nobody wants to touch.
Governments want to downsize or outsource
governance to the private sector or civil society.
They do not believe they can fix what is broken,
and high-profile environment ministers do not want
to touch this as it brings them little kudos. It
is a hard job and it is not immediately
recognised. Civil society does not push for this
because it distrusts the bureaucracy and believes
that strengthening it will further corrode the
power of the people. So, the agenda is unattended
and institutions, abused.

This has to be the
biggest lesson of the past four decades. We cannot
fix what is broken till we make an attempt to fix
it. There is no doubt that we cannot have the same
“inspectors”, but we can have new-age
tools of transparency, data analysis and do
everything that builds public trust and
credibility. Similarly, we cannot have the same
“sticks” but we do need even stronger
enforcement systems that can make deterrence
work.

This is the real
environmental agenda, but one that is inconvenient
to handle. It is about change that
matters.